Abstract

Rather than reading Plato's philosophy of arithmetic ‘charitably’, it is better to try to explain its failure to generate any fruitful ideas. Prominent in the explanation is Plato's focus on predicates assigning cardinalities and on ‘groups’ falling under them. This focus left Plato unable to envisage the possibility, emerging in Dedekind and Frege but which arithmetic in Plato's time would not easily have suggested, of regarding numbers as objects essentially ranged in the structure of a progression